


A Cigar Box

by nobromo



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Barnes Siblings - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Kinda, Letters, M/M, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sadness, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, World War II, i guess, idk they find some old letters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-15
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-06-27 21:30:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15693750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nobromo/pseuds/nobromo
Summary: The box didn’t just have one letter in it, it had twenty-seven. The first one, actually, was addressed to Steve – written by Becca when they heard news of Bucky’s death and then never sent after they’d heard news of Steve’s. The other twenty-six were updates, through the years, of Barnes family holidays, Christmases, weddings, Thanksgivings, christenings and funerals. Some were five pages long, others only five paragraphs. They were detailed, descriptive, and full of longing.Steve was not going to read them.





	A Cigar Box

Dear Bucky, the letter began. 

It was kept in an old cigar box. Not that any of them ever really smoked cigars. First of all, they were expensive and European. Secondly, they tasted foul and their smell used to upset Steve’s asthma a little more than normal cigarettes. Bucky’s dad smoked a pipe. Bucky did, too, for a little bit, but that stopped in the war. Much easier to buy, or steal, or trade cigarettes than pipe tobacco. Besides, keeping a pipe clean was always a bit too much effort than felt he had the time for. 

Anyway. The letter was in a cigar box. The box had a sticker on it, written in Becca’s son’s handwriting, stuck over another sticker that was, apparently, written by her, but faded too much over the years. The sticker said Mum’s letters and things for her brother Bucky. Becca’s sticker had said For James Buchanan Barnes 1917-43. 

The cigar box itself was kept in Becca’s son’s attic, along with a plait of his mother’s hair that she cut once and kept for no apparent reason, several photo albums of posed war photographs from the Barnes side of the family, and an old paddling pool from when his daughters were significantly younger. 

The box didn’t just have one letter in it, it had twenty-seven. The first one, actually, was addressed to Steve – written by Becca when they heard news of Bucky’s death and then never sent after they’d heard news of Steve’s. The other twenty-six were updates, through the years, of Barnes family holidays, Christmases, weddings, Thanksgivings, christenings and funerals. Some were five pages long, others only five paragraphs. They were detailed, descriptive, and full of longing. 

Steve was not going to read them. 

~

Jimmy, Becca’s eldest son, visited Steve at the coffee shop that Pepper made Stark install on the ground floor of the Avengers Tower. 

It was all glass panels and shining metal, the clinking of china and smell of ground coffee beans. It was where Pepper showed Steve what a skinny soya flat white was, and where Steve then had to sit down and take deep breaths in through his nose for five counts and out through his mouth for eight and not think about how little money everyone had in the 1930s. He wasn’t in the 1930s anymore. He hadn’t been for a long time. 

It was where Natasha had taken him to try their new cookies, and he’d only brought three cents because he’d forgotten, temporarily, about inflation. 

And now, it was where Becca Barnes’ son, Jimmy Proctor, gave Steve a cigar box and told him that the three little girls that Steve had known, the ones with fluffy brown hair and crooked smiles, had died. 

Dottie had been sixteen when Steve last saw her, getting good grades and working hard to make it somewhere big so that people would stop looking at her like she was someone small. She’d died of breast cancer in 1972, having worked as an advisor for a Congressman. 

“Oh.” Steve said.

Ruth had been nineteen, engaged to a boy from down the street and already starting a patchwork baby quilt. She died aged eighty-three, four years after her husband, having never conceived a child. 

“Oh.” Steve said.

Becca had been twenty-two, Bucky’s secret favourite, the sister he talked to about his problems, the sister whose boyfriend Steve and he had punched when they saw him with his hand up the skirt of another girl down the back alley near Thompson’s grocer’s. She was the sister he argued the most with, who he complained never pulled her weight around the house, never helped their mother, always picked on her younger siblings. He was the sister he used to cry the most about leaving behind to go to war, when he thought Steve was asleep. She died in the early 2000’s, one of her son’s killed in Vietnam, another killed from AIDs, and the third, the eldest, sitting before Steve, holding a cigar box. 

Steve doesn’t really have much else to say. 

Jimmy looks at him directly in the eye in the way that Steve isn'tused to, this side of his plane crash. In a way he hadn’t really been used to since Howard Stark zapped him full of muscles. 

“I was named after him, you know.” Jimmy says. 

“Oh.” Steve wonders if he has another word in his vocabulary. 

“She never stopped talking about him. Or you, for that matter.” Steve’s lack of speech doesn’t seem to deter Jimmy, who has clearly inherited his mother’s love for filling silences. “Every celebration, every gathering, we’d make a toast to you two, and she’d lay a spot at the table. She used to talk to him, like he was there. It got a bit worse after Steve died in ‘nam.” He looked at Steve quickly, “Our Steve, my little brother” He clarifies. 

Steve wonders how many Steve’s there are out there that were named after him. Then he tries not to think about it. 

“We thought about her too.” He says, instead. “In the war. Bucky used to –“ He stops. “He used to –“ 

“I know.” Says Jimmy, who clearly doesn’t know, because what Steve is trying to say is that he used to lie awake at night, breathing in the cool, damp air of their tent, and ask Steve what he thought his sisters were doing right then and there. 

‘Dancing’, Steve would say. ‘They’re in the kitchen and your ma’s got the radio on and their swinging round the little table to Glenn Miller.’

‘You reckon?’ Bucky would say. 

And Steve would say, ‘Yeah. Sure as hell, pal.’

Jimmy leaves Steve with the box, and his phone number. He’s an accountant, and he still lives in New York. 

Steve looks him up on the Facebook, like Pepper got Tony to show him how to do, and Steve sits in the coffee shop with his lukewarm black coffee and looks through ten years of photos. Jimmy is 67, has twin daughters in their thirties with jet black hair, is divorced (Steve presumes) from his wife Tishtria. He has a grandchild of whom he seems very fond. He also, every year on March 10, donates money to a charity that supports impoverished children in New York, in the name of his uncle, whom he never met. 

Steve stands up, finishes his cold coffee, recycles the cup (Bruce told him about the importance of recycling for about 20 minutes one time he forgot that you don’t just throw paper in the trash like you used to), and walks to his flat. 

There, he closes the door, sits on the uncomfortable ‘mid century modern’ arm chair that someone thought he might like, and sobs for fourteen minutes and thirty-three seconds. Any more than that and he’d be making a scene, he decides. 

Then he picks up the cigar box and puts it in the large safe that he bought himself that Tony seemed to see as a personal criticism against the Avengers Tower’s safety systems.   
And there it will stay, he thinks. 

 

~

For three weeks the safe seems to burn a hole into him every time he walks past it. 

For three weeks he thinks about Dottie working flat out to make a difference, sick of being the youngest sibling in a too big family, sick of being a small woman who nobody listened to. He thinks of her sitting in a big important office, and then getting sick and having to quit her job before dying in a hospice, with only two of her three siblings there. 

For three weeks he thinks of the quilt that Ruth was stitching. He wonders where it will be now, he wonders what happened to the dress of his mothers with the tiny yellow flowers that he gave to her to cut up and stitch into it. For three weeks he thinks of how much she wanted a child, and that she never got one. 

For three weeks he thinks of Becca giving birth to a son and naming him James. And then, because Steve is Steve and he likes to be bitter, he thinks about Becca allowing her son to call himself Jimmy even though Bucky hated the name Jimmy. He once kicked Tommy W when they were six and he wouldn’t call him anything else.

Then three weeks after Jimmy met him in the coffee shop and gave him a cigar box that seemed to hold the entire past, he gets back from a mission. He’s sweaty and pumped up and he has someone else’s blood on his face. He’s got a familiar itch under his skin – he wants to pick a fight with someone (Bucky), he wants to have sex with someone (Bucky), he wants to eat food made by someone who loves him (Bucky). 

He unlocks the safe, takes out the cigar box, and opens the one letter addressed to him. And then he reads it. 

~

'Steve,' says the letter. 

'Today we heard about Bucky. We received a telegram, which I think is awful unfair, but ma says that’s what happens to everyone.'

Steve thinks about when Fury told him they forked out for a whole parade of military officials to ‘kindly’ let the Barnes family know that Steve had been killed. Steve thinks the world is fucking unfair to people who don’t have a senator, or Howard Stark, kissing their all-American ass. 

'We heard that he is missing, presumed dead, and that it happened in action, and that that’s all they gonna tell us now, or maybe ever. Ma did that thing she does where she squints her eyes and pinches her nose and then tells us she’s gonna go run a bath. Except this time she didn’t tell us she was gonna run a bath, she just let herself cry while she was stood there with us all. She said a lot of things about ‘her boy’, but I think Dottie cried the loudest. You know how she gets sometimes. Ma has told me since, in private, that she’s worried the news might mean that Ruthie’s gonna lose another baby.' 

Oh hell, thinks Steve. Oh hell. 

'I’m not saying any of this to make you feel any kinda way.' The letter carries on. 

'I just thought that I’d paint you the picture out all clear because I know that you should be here with us, right now, and not out there alone without him. So I wanted you to know how we are feeling. 

I also wanted to let you know that we love you, and we know that he loves you. I’m sure as heck that whatever happened, you’ll be blaming yourself, and nothing I’m gonna say will change that. So I’m telling you know that we don’t blame you for one minute, and he sure as anything isn’t blaming you from where he’s looking down on you. 

I’m telling you, Steve, that you need to come home safe, and not do anything stupid, and then I guess maybe we could get you married to one of us (obviously not Ruthie, but I’ll have you I guess if you think Dottie will still be too young then), because then you could stay with us and live in our house. He’d have laughed at that, I’m sure. Think of how that would make him laugh. 

There’s plenty more for us to tell you, but I’m gonna wait until you come home for me to do that. 

Always with love, 

Miss Rebecca Barnes'

Steve refolds the letter, places it back in the cigar box and places the cigar box back in the safe and locks the door. 

Then he opens the safe, moves the cigar box so that it’s right at the back and underneath everything else, and closes the safe again. 

Then he goes to the gym. 

There, he thinks, that’s it laid to rest now. 

~

Two years later and he’s travelled across more of Europe than he was ever really expecting to. Sam called it a lot of chasing when they could’ve just stopped still, but they both know that he’d have done whatever Steve thought was best. 

So the three of them ran, Steve and Sam one step behind and Bucky one step ahead, until they all got tired of running, and Bucky shot at a runaway Hydra lab tech in Split, and Steve got in the way of the bullet and bled out a bit in their safehouse while Sam bandaged him up and cursed him to hell. And their Bucky found them, and sat there, and stayed until Steve was healed up. And then stayed some more after that. 

Later, he thinks he should’ve jumped in front of bullets more if it had such an immediate response. 

Even later, Bucky is living with him in a brownstone in New York that’s got too much space and not really enough charm, and he tells Steve he wants somewhere to keep his files. He won’t throw them away, likes to occasionally flick through all their gory details even though it’s still stored in his brain and keeping him awake at night, and Steve’s never been one to tell him no, especially not now. 

Steve suggests his safe (even though Tony's told him it's easy to break into), but there’s quite a lot in there, so he’ll have to do some rummaging around. 

Bucky laughs at some of the names on the fake passports he finds. He laughs even more when he finds receipts for all the things Steve bought when he was tempted by late night TV commercials. Then he stops laughing. 

“What you found now, Buck?” Steve calls through from where he’s trying to make a lasagne like the one Bruce is so good at. 

Bucky doesn’t say anything, he just walks into the kitchen holding a cigar box. On the cigar box is a sticker, stuck over a sticker, and the sticker says Mum’s letters and things for her brother Bucky. 

“Oh.” Says Steve. 

“When were you gonna tell me about this?” Bucky says. 

Steve’s not quite sure what to say. He can’t say he forgot the letters – he was brought up being told that lying was one of the 10 Commandments and he could go to hell for it. And the letters aren’t the kind of thing that’s easy to forget. 

But he thinks of when he googled Dottie and found an obituary online that quoted her saying she wouldn’t have been who she was without the endless support and enthusiasm of her two brothers, Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers. 

He thinks about the foster children he managed to get in touch with, who said that Ruth changed the course of their lives by bringing them into her warm, comfortable home, and telling them stories of little boys who went off to save their country because they had to, but also because they knew what was right. 

He thinks of Jimmy, who he keeps in touch with via email, who now has two grandchildren and who invited Steve to his daughter’s marriage because his mother taught him that nothing was more important than family, and besides, the Irish are always fun at weddings. 

“I guess,” Steve says, “that I sort of wanted to pretend that nothing happened to them after we were gone.” 

“You wanted to pretend they were all dancing round that damn kitchen table to Glenn fucking Miller, more like”, says Bucky. 

“Yeah.” Steve huffs a laugh but they both know that he’s not joking. 

“Same, pal.” Says Bucky. 

Steve turns around to grate some more cheese on top of the lasagne now. He’s amazed at the different types of cheese you can get now. Bruce said he could use cheddar, and American, and anything else really. Steve doesn’t actually know what goat’s cheese tastes like but he’s putting it on here and just hoping for the best. 

“But they did grow up.” Says Steve. “They grew up and they had lives without you or me being involved.”

“Can you imagine Ruthie bringing up her kids and not teaching them all your Rogers wisdom?” Bucky says dryly. 

“Ruth never managed to have kids.” Steve says quietly. 

“Oh.” Says Bucky. “Oh.”

Then he opens the cigar box and starts to read. 

~

'Dear Bucky,' the last letter starts the same as those before it. 

'I hope you’re wondering about Jimmy’s wife because I sure as heck am. I want to know just what he did to chase away such a lovely woman. I’m not half tempted to go and ask her to take him back because he’s come crawling to my door aged 53 and with manners like you had. I get what ma was on about when she said boys are more difficult. And she only had one! Or two, I guess, with Steve, but he really wasn’t as much of a pain. I had three, and all of them were devils. 

I’m really too old to be looking after people acting like little boys any more, to be quite frank. The other week I had another of those silly falls, and while it’s nice to have him around so I’m not lying like a damn beetle on my back all afternoon until the neighbours see me through the window, it’s also much easier to fall when your stupid son leaves his work files stacked up on the stairs. On the stairs! He’s more like you than his father who, like I’ve said, was gentle as anything and wouldn’t do something so dumb. I curse the bits of you that I see in him. If only he was more like Steve. 

I was just thinking about you the other day when I made some cherry scones. I’m not even sure if you ever had cherry scones, but I know you’d like them. All sweet and lovely with jam. Although the price of jam these days does make me start thinking I should make my own again. 

Anyway, I was thinking of you and Steve and what you’re getting up to up there, and I was reminded of the time I saw you two kissing in the dark. Ha! I don’t think you ever knew I knew about all that, but you’d be daft if you thought you were good at hiding from me. 

The others knew too, eventually, especially when we went with ma to clean out Steve’s old flat and found half your things in his cupboards and your jumpers left in his bed still smelling of the two of you. All those drawings of you as well under the bed! I’m glad it was me that found them and not ma – she’d have dropped down there and then. I burnt them but still think about them every so often. 

Anyway, there you were sat at the kitchen table next to each other in the dark and I was just walking in back from work at that silly typist’s job I hated, and I was just about to say hello when you tugged him in and planted one right on him. I think I nearly died. I remember looking at you the next day and wondering what Steve saw in you, and then looking at him and wondering what you saw in him. I guess you two ugly mugs were suited just fine for each other. 

I want you to know I never told you I saw you because I love you, not because I don’t. I’m sure you’ll understand, though I’m finding it hard to today, now there’s so many gays out and about. 

As always, I’m sending my love and prayers to you, my husband, and my boys. 

Mrs Rebecca Barnes Proctor.'

~

Six months and three days later, Bucky is belatedly made the godfather of Jimmy’s granddaughter, not that any of them are religious. 

They invite the extended family over to Steve’s brownstone for a big meal (without the lasagne, Steve’s learnt by now that it’s best leaving that recipe to Bruce). They eat, and they laugh, and they drink, and Bucky won’t let the babies leave his lap. They talk to Dottie’s children about their jobs and the price of flights to New York. They talk to Ruth’s foster kids about Ruth and her husband and the original Steve Rogers artwork they kept on their walls (Steve blushes cherry tomato red at this). They talk to Jimmy and his daughters about childcare, and yearly donations to impoverished children in New York. 

They talk about Bucky’s ma, about his kitchen table where they used to fight over seats, about Dottie’s curls that she loved to hate, about Ruth’s calm composure when dealing with any problems, about Becca’s stories that she told. 

On the wall, they have photos of Bucky’s sisters when they were young, smiling at the camera and holding onto their big brother. Next to them, they have ones of when they were old, with fluffy grey hair and crooked smiles, and eyes that had seen a whole life that Bucky and Steve can only imagine. 

Bucky wanted to frame the letter from 1947 that writes in detail about Becca’s horror at discovering Steve’s artistic portrayals of Bucky’s naked body under his bed, but Steve won’t let him. So the letters remain in the cigar box, inside the safe. 

And there, Steve thinks, is where they’ll stay. For now.

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first thing I've posted on here even though I've read tons!! pls enjoy/go easy lol


End file.
